The Great Outdoors: In bleak winter, hope is the thing with feathers

Feb. 14, 2014

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| By Rick Marsi

February boils down to hope and despair. Which of the two will win out?

That depends on how many times you have slipped on the ice. It depends on the number of times someone has scrawled “wash me” on the hood of your car.

As indignities mount, despair often picks up momentum.

As for hope, it also exists. To experience it, you must push through the grit, knowing sometime this month, the first shaft of light from the end of the tunnel will fall on your pale winter face.

I stood outdoors several evenings ago when a shaft crossed my winter-worn visage. The time was 5:30 p.m. A month ago, darkness had fallen at 5:30. Now I could read the newspaper. Chalk one up for the forces of hope.

Another recent evening, while I stood in the woods outside a friend’s house, a barred owl began hooting. Barred owls don’t begin courting until LATE winter and continue through early spring. The owl’s haunting hoots gave the forest new life. Mark another one down for the good guys.

Amazingly last week, someone called about bluebirds — six or eight, flying about in a back yard, poking about in bird houses. I would expect this during a snow-free winter, when dry berries on dogwood and viburnum shrubs can easily be had for the taking. But what were the bluebirds surviving on now? My correspondents didn’t know, but as fast as they put mealworms out on a tray, bluebirds showed up to quickly consume them.

Bluebirds give me hope.

Speaking of phone calls, I received the computerized version of one — an e-mail — a few days ago from a friend in Texas. “We had 50 robins in the yard yesterday,” he wrote. “They took off, though. They must be migrating.”

Finally, there came this truism, spoken by a friend recently: “It always comes,” he said, when the subject of springtime came up. “Just when it seems it will never show up, it arrives.”

To hear someone say this out loud, in all its obviousness, gave me hope.

As you can see, last week saw me accumulating hope by the bucketful. Then came the inevitable backlash. Wednesday’s dump load of snow made the piles two feet high. I looked out while it fell. Not a bird in the woods. Not a deer, not a gray or red squirrel.